As, slowly and painfully, we come to terms with what happened on Bondi Beach on Sunday, I divide my reactions into four parts: one question each addressed to the Prime Minister and the virulent anti-Israeli protestors, a comment on the Prime Minister’s leadership failings, and an anticipatory reaction to charges of Islamophobia.
Now Do You Believe Them, Prime Minister?
After October 7, it would have been understandable but unforgivable if Australia’s Jews went Muslim-hunting to identify, shame, harangue individuals, and graffiti, defile, and set fire to mosques. None of this happened.
Instead, and before Israel retaliated, while Israelis and diaspora Jews were still in the stupor of the shock of October 7 and collecting, identifying bodies and body parts, coming to terms with the horror of industrial-scale rape and sexual mutilation, there were twin explosions of the celebration of the carnage in southern Israel and Jew hatred on the streets of metropolitan Western cities. On the steps of our iconic Opera House, they chanted what to mere human ears sounded like ‘Gas the Jews!’ but our police assure us was really ‘Where’s the Jews?’ To coin a phrase, this is a distinction without a difference. The first references the Holocaust. The second references one or more of the innumerable instances of pogroms in the bloodstained history of European antisemitism.
Since then, the mass protests by people adorned in the chic fashion icons of the keffiyeh and the Palestinian flag that signalled their virtue, their chants of ‘Globalise the Intifada’ and ‘From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free’ have become normalised. Innumerable commentators, including yours truly, have spelt out the Jewish life-threatening connotations of the first chant and the genocidal meaning of the second. Synagogues, Jewish schools, shops, and people wearing outward symbols of Jewishness have been harassed, attacked, and firebombed. Jewish children in Melbourne go to schools and childcare centres with armed guards posted outside.
And all the time, the Labor government has proven itself exceptionally skilled in the political arts of obfuscation, denial, deflection, and pointing the finger at anyone but its leadership for responsibility. Labor’s senior colleagues tut-tutted, mentioned Islamophobia in the next breath, and then pivoted to criticising Israel and recognising the pretend state of Palestine.
In my view, all for the sake of locking up the Muslim votes – there are a million Muslims against 100,000 Jews in Australia – in a few crucial electorates.
For all the brutality and the savagery of the attacks on civilians, elderly, women, and children on October 7, neither the Prime Minister nor the Foreign Minister have been to the site of the 2023 massacres. The cruelty of the snub is still, more than two years later, scarcely believable. Nor, to my knowledge, have they ever sat down to watch the stomach-churning 40-minute documentary video of what happened that, owing to the graphic content, has been released for only limited showing by Israeli authorities.
Are You Happy Now, Keffiyeh-Waving ‘Progressives’?
On the 15th, while still smarting from the horror that began unfolding just 24 hours earlier, Yoni Bashan wrote a searing and heartfelt critique in The Australian. He called out by name various well-known personalities who have encouraged and amplified the rage against Jews for having ‘laid the foundations, brick by rhetorical brick, post by viral post, march by march’. We saw the hard face and ugly reality of globalised intifada on Bondi Beach. It takes chutzpah for some of the progressive activists, influencers, podcasters, creative artists and forever-raging Greens to have shown up to lay wreaths, offer condolences, and condemn the terrorist attack.
What did they think their ritualistic chants and slogans, their demands for global stigmatisation and criminal lawfare against a state engaged in an existential warfare against determined, lethally armed and implacable enemies mean – love thy Jewish neighbour? Did they really believe they were promoting peace, joy, and goodwill among all faiths and people? Or they knew but simply did not care because well, Israel is a uniquely evil state with no redeeming features?
I hope you are all, every single one of you, happy now as the victim-shaming and terrorist – sorry, resistance-celebrating – taunts and insults you hurled in our public spaces, wearing shirts emblazoned with terror-meting paragliders, bore fruit on Sunday.
Voters of Kooyong, are you too happy that you threw Josh Frydenberg out of Parliament and politics? He is the man who almost certainly would have inherited the party leadership and the post of Leader of the Opposition and done a far superior job of holding Albanese’s feet to the fire over the past few years.
Occasionally, in reacting to my public defence of the right of Israel to exist and of Jews to safety and dignity that is the expectation of every Australian under equality of citizenship, I am told my comments betray my origins as an Indian Hindu. I have so far held my tongue against the retort: Have you considered the possibility that you are betraying the centuries-old Euro-Christian legacy of murderous antisemitism? My reticence ends henceforth. I come from a civilisational legacy with no history of antisemitism and that includes the Paradesi Synagogue in Kochi, built in 1568 – the oldest-surviving synagogue in the Commonwealth – by the Sephardic community exiled from Spain and Portugal decades earlier. (Paradesi means foreigner in Hindi.) Its most-cherished possessions are the fourth-century copper plates inscribed (in the local Malayalam script) with the Jewish community’s charter of independence and the privileges granted to them by the raja of Cochin.
Leadership
The single most important role and responsibility of a prime minister or president is to provide leadership: the elusive ability to make others connect emotionally and intellectually to a larger cause that transcends their immediate self-interest. Leadership consists of articulating a bold and noble vision for a community and establishing standards of achievement and conduct, explaining why they matter and inspiring or coaxing others to adopt the agreed goals and benchmarks as their personal goals. Of all the people I have known directly in my lifetime, the person who best embodied this elusive quality was the late UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
This is true whether the requirement is to rally the nation to fight an all-out war against an aggressor – demonstrated brilliantly in recent times by Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky – or to unite in grief in the midst of a national tragedy. In the latter case, a leader must be able to capture and convey the shock, horror, grief, and mourning, but also the resolve and the promise of the sunlit uplands if we pull together to get through the transient pain. We saw this in action on January 28, 1986, when the Challenger space shuttle exploded 73 seconds after take-off, killing all seven crew on board. President Ronald Reagan memorably told the nation, using words penned by his speech writer Peggy Noonan that referenced an earlier poem by John Gillespie Magee Jnr:
‘We will never forget … the last time we saw them this morning as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye, and slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God’.
Anthony Albanese has been weighed in the crucible of the Bondi Beach tragedy and found wanting.
He has been too preoccupied with factional jockeying within the Labor Party and indulging his favourite passion of fighting Tories to fulfil his most solemn duty as Prime Minister to ensure the safety of all Australians. He doesn’t seem to have outgrown his days of student politics. At his first press conference in Canberra on Sunday the December 14, he read from a prepared speech written by someone else, I can only assume, who had no show of empathy. He then made it worse by failing to turn up at the first funerals on Wednesday. Suspicions abound that he is thin-skinned and cannot cope with shows of public booing and jeering from emotional grievers who believe he has blood on his hands.
Albanese has failed the stress-test of leadership more comprehensively than anyone I can remember in a long time. He is a much-diminished Prime Minister who has contributed to Australia being a much-diminished nation on the world stage. As the massacre happened on one of the world’s iconic beaches, Lady Macbeth’s lament is apposite for Albanese: ‘Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red.’
As most readers will be able to guess from my name, and as the Spectator Australia readers know, I am an Australian of Indian origin, in that order in the hierarchy of identity. After the brutal and prolonged rape of a young woman on the streets of Delhi as 2012 came to an end, I wrote in The Australian on December 31: ‘Never have I felt so ashamed to be from India nor so despairing of its future.’ After Bondi Beach, for the first time I feel similar sentiments about Australia.
Albanese’s failures were highlighted further by Frydenberg’s presence at the scene of the massacre on Wednesday and the moving, eloquent and extemporaneous address he delivered from the heart that could well rank as one of the great speeches in Australian political history. His forceful critique of Albanese’s record had all the more bite for the many times Frydenberg himself had warned the Prime Minister of the dangerously deteriorating environment for Australia’s Jews. And he called out Albanese on the cynical deflection to gun control laws:
‘Let me tell you, guns may have stolen the life of 15 innocent civilians, but it was radical Islamist ideology that pulled the trigger. And if you, Prime Minister, can’t say those words, Islamist ideology, if you can’t speak them, you can’t solve them.’
They have sat on the recommendations from their hand-picked antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal for months. At every opportunity, the Labor government has drawn a moral equivalence between Islamophobia and antisemitism, including the parallel appointments of special envoys for each. They have obstinately refused to listen to anyone warning that the premature recognition of a non-existent Palestinian state was, and would be seen by Israelis, Jews and Hamas, as vindication for October 7 and therefore a reward for and emboldening of antisemitic terrorism.
Ahmed al-Ahmed, a humble fruiterer, will forever be defined by his act of courage. He walked fearlessly to the gunman already engaged in a killing spree, tackled him to the ground, and wrested the high-powered rifle away from him giving no consideration to self-preservation.
Anthony Albanese, the Prime Minister at least in name, will forever be defined by his acts of serial cowardice dictated by calculations of political survival. Whenever he is faced with an opportunity to show decisive leadership, he looks it firmly in the eye, turns around, and walks off resolutely in the opposite direction.
I am done with offering condolences to our Jewish community, including neighbours on my street – they deserve more than empty platitudes. What is needed now is zero tolerance of antisemitism and the immediate arrest and prosecution of anyone encouraging incitement to murder.
To repeat for the umpteenth time, Bondi Beach on Sunday showed us the ugly face of what ‘Globalise the Intifada’ means in practice, of how tolerance and normalisation of hate speech morphs seamlessly into mass murder. The hate-spewing marches must be banned – we cannot allow liberal tolerance to go on being weaponised against us by fanatic adherents of some of the least tolerant ideologies around. The federal and state governments must stop playing favourites to protect or gain electoral advantage. As Terry Barnes has outlined, the questions that need urgent investigation and answering are multiplying faster than any answers that are forthcoming for this excuse of a government.
The task is to enforce existing laws without fear or favour, not to extend the tentacles of state censorship and powers even more to cover every citizen.
Police and counter-terrorism forces must focus their attention on the biggest security threat that confronts Australia. We know what that elephant in the room is. The requirements are there in the Segal report. They were repeated on Wednesday by Frydenberg. Or we can resign ourselves to Hanukkah being the trailer for Christmas on the beach, just as Germany’s famed Christmas markets are under threat.
I do not see how national healing and restoration of some semblance of normal decency and civic cohesion can begin until Albanese, Penny Wong, and Tony Burke have resigned their cabinet positions. They have defiled this once great nation where life has been good even for us immigrants who nestled comfortably into its tolerant and inclusive welcome underpinned by humane values. Whether they stay as backbench MPs is up to them.
I have never been a member of any political party in the many countries in which I have lived in my lifetime. Come elections, I have preferred to evaluate parties, party leaders, and prime ministers-in-waiting, constituency candidates and their relative prospects as per opinion polls, and then decided on my choices, either in single-member constituencies under the first-past-the-post systems or in ranked choice systems of preferential voting. But if these three excuses for political leaders are still in office, the ALP will be ruled out of consideration from my voting decision. That is my intention. I know one solitary vote will have no practical effect either at the local or national level. But it will bring me emotional satisfaction and that is enough.
Deflecting to Islamophobia
In 2015, I cautioned Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his first term that he was at the risk of turning India into a Hindu Pakistan. During his second term, in 2021, I emphasised the importance of equal citizenship for Indians of all faiths, the argument that I was to reprise in Australia against the Voice referendum in 2023. In an article in February 2021, I commended the example of New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to Modi, drawing attention to her pitch-perfect response to the tragedy of the Christchurch mosques massacre of Muslim worshippers. Exhorting the Indian Prime Minister to reverse the Hindu-Muslim sectarian polarisation being entrenched in the country, I urged him to rein in the hate-spewing Hindutva mobs and practice as well as preach inclusion. ‘An excellent role model for him to emulate,’ I wrote, is Ardern’s ‘brilliant performance in the immediate aftermath of the Christchurch mosque massacres’ in March 2019.
I wrote a joint op-ed with the noted Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid in the International Herald Tribune (which has now morphed into the international edition of the New York Times) in August 1995 advocating for an extension of the Oslo peace process from the Israel-Palestine conflict to the India-Pakistan conflict. I wrote another joint article in the same august paper with my friend and former ANU colleague Amin Saikal in March 2001 that criticised the destruction of the Bamiyan statues by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, but also drew attention to the parallels with the destruction of the Ayodhya mosque in India.
For my troubles, I have been subjected to attacks by Hindutva trolls mocking me as a self-loathing Indian ashamed to be a Hindu, some of which were truly vile and others slightly menacing. At the same time, in response to some other articles on issues or events where I have supported the Indian position, some people from Pakistan and of Pakistani origin have accused me of abandoning scholarly objectivity to openly show my Indian origins and Hindu identity.
Given its size and regional, religious, linguistic, caste and incomes diversity, combined with a history of foreign invasions, conquests and empires taking local root, India has the world’s most challenging environment at scale for integrating all groups into a credible and viable framework of unity-in-diversity. In addition, I have also been privileged in my professional work to grapple with the governance dilemma in several countries beset with sectarian divisions and conflicts. False modesty aside, there would be very few Australians with the depth and breadth of knowledge and lived experience of the challenges of governance of a plural society.
So please, spare me the sermons on Islamophobia as a threat to multiculturalism, pluralism and social inclusion. We do need to have the difficult conversation on the numbers of immigration that is safe to protect and preserve Australia as a cohesive society, and the countries of origin that are most problematical from this point of view. The risk of an incompatible and hostile cultural enclave within the dominant civilisational framework that has served Australia exceptionally well is real, as proven by what happened on Bondi Beach.
